Hidden consultants and hurried payments: Records reveal details of DeSantis' campaign against abortion and marijuana amendments
Ron DeSantis employed campaign strategists as subcontractors, bent procurement rules, and took millions from reserves, in a taxpayer-fund ad campaign against two citizen-led ballot measures last year.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis paid campaign strategists working on hidden subcontracts, approved rushed payments under misleading pretenses, and took millions of dollars from reserves, as he waged a taxpayer-funded advertising war last fall against two citizen-led constitutional amendments that would have protected abortion rights and legalized marijuana in Florida.
The details of DeSantis’ unprecedented public advertising campaign — in which the Republican governor filled the state’s airwaves with so-called “public service announcements” attacking a pair of petition drives supported by millions of Floridians — are contained in hundreds pages of emails, invoices, transaction logs, and other documents obtained by Seeking Rents through a series of public records requests.
The paper trail is still nowhere near complete: Almost a year later, the Governors’ Office is still withholding many key records related to the advertising campaigns against Amendment 3, which would have permitted Floridians to use marijuana for recreation, and Amendment 4, which would have overturned a statewide abortion ban. Both measures won majority support from Florida voters — 56 percent for marijuana, 57 percent for abortion — but fell short of the 60 percent supermajority needed to amend the state constitution.
Immediately after the election, Seeking Rents requested records from the five state agencies DeSantis used to sponsor ads: The Agency for Health Care Administration, the Department of Children & Families, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and the Department of Transportation. To date, just two — AHCA and FDOT — have produced records in response, and they only did so last month.
But even the fragments released so far suggest that DeSantis ultimately burned through far more taxpayer cash fighting the abortion and ballot measures than was publicly known at the time.
Between the five state agencies and two charities funded by the state — one of which, the Hope Florida Foundation, is at the center of a criminal investigation — Seeking Rents now estimates that Ron DeSantis spent between $35 million and $40 million in public funds on commercials intended to weaken support for Amendments 3 and 4.
That’s not all. The DeSantis administration also paid at least $370,000 in legal bills related to its public campaigning against the two ballot measures. The governor and his staff enlisted at least four firms in that portion of the campaign — which included not just defending the state-sponsored ads but also threatening television stations into taking down commercials sponsored by the group behind the abortion-rights measure. One of the firms billed Florida taxpayers $750 an hour.
The tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money that Ron DeSantis spent attacking the abortion and marijuana amendments was also on top of millions more contributed by private donors who got public favors from the governor. Notable examples included a coalition of hemp industry executives and lobbyists who promised to give millions after DeSantis vetoed a bill that would have strictly regulated the industry, and tobacco giant Phillip Morris International, which landed a lucrative tax break from the administration after giving the governor $500,000.
Beyond the total amount of money spent, the new records also reveal some of the many ways in which the governor and his aides bent rules and blurred the lines between public governing and political campaigning.
And they underscore just how desperate Ron DeSantis was in the fall of 2024 to defeat Amendments 3 and 4.
Once seen as a rising star on the national stage, DeSantis had just suffered a humiliating defeat to Donald Trump in the presidential election that had badly damaged his standing with Republican leaders, donors and activists. So Florida’s governor bet his political future on stopping the abortion and marijuana ballot measures.
Then he used the power and resources of state government to do it.
‘UF or FSU are pricey’
The email was terse, the tone urgent.
“Any update on those prime time availabilities?” Jessica Ottaviano, the communications director at the Florida Department of Transportation, wrote to a staffer in the agency’s State Safety Office. “Need ASAP.”
It was late in the evening on Sept. 4, 2024, just a few weeks before Floridians would begin voting in the fall elections. FDOT was one of five agencies spread across state government in Tallahassee that were just beginning what would become a two-month-long advertising blitz against Amendment 3 and Amendment 4 — the marijuana and abortion rights initiatives that had qualified for the ballot after grueling petition drives in which organizers had collected a million signatures apiece.
The DeSantis administration, records show, had already rushed a few quick spots onto the air with help from the Florida Association of Broadcasters, a lobbying group that represents owners of television stations and could provide steeply discounted, immediately available airtime.
But the governor and his allies wanted to go much bigger. So senior staffers at FDOT were leaning on employees in the State Safety Office, which airs public service announcements about issues like drunk driving and pedestrian safety through a marketing program called “Target Zero” — a reference to the agency’s longterm goal of eliminating all traffic fatalities in Florida.
FDOT leadership wanted quotes from advertising vendors on the cost of placing ads everywhere from digital billboards to some fast-approaching, big-audience event. Chris Craig, an administrator in FDOT’s Safety Office who helps run the Target Zero program, quickly got them the information they wanted.
Two days later, for instance, on Sept. 5, records show that Craig sent Ottaviano and FDOT Chief of Staff Leda Kelly rates for 30-second spots during the Sept. 10 presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. A commercial in Gainesville, one of Florida’s smallest media markets, would cost $200. A spot in Miami would cost $15,000.
A day later, Craig passed along prices for ads during upcoming college and NFL football games. The quotes were even higher: As much as $20,000 for a single spot in Tampa or Orlando and up to $80,000 in Miami.
“UF or FSU are pricey,” noted the attached spreadsheet, which had been compiled by reps at St. John & Partners, a Jacksonville-based ad agency that handles some of FDOT’s Target Zero advertising.
The Governor’s Office opted not to use the Target Zero program to run those immediate commercials. But only, records show, because they could not make contractual changes quickly enough.
“I have not heard anything yet the billboards and videos,” Craig wrote in a Sept. 10 email to his contact at St. John & Partners. “I did hear that they were pursuing the debate commercials under another contract, only because we did not have the funding in the right place to make a task work order happen quick enough.”
Craig didn’t say who “they” was. And it’s not clear if the DeSantis administration ever managed to get commercials onto the air in time for the presidential debate. Representatives from the Governor’s Office and the Florida Department of Transportation declined to answer any questions.
But two days later, records show that another arm of the administration — the Agency for Health Care Administration — booked $270,000 worth of ads during that weekend’s slate of football games.
The agency used at least some of the ad slots to run a television commercial attacking Amendment 4, the abortion-rights ballot measure.
Bending state spending rules
The Governor’s Office itself helped arrange that accelerated ad buy. And it did so through an odd arrangement that involved two different state agencies and a six-year-old contract.
To book the ads, AHCA latched onto a contract between the Department of Environmental Protection and a small marketing firm in Tallahassee called Strategic Digital Services. DEP has used the contract — which was signed in 2019 and initially worth only a few hundred thousand dollars — to promote state parks and coral reef conservation, among other initiatives.
A two-page “Statement of Work” between AHCA and Strategic Digital Services — dated Sept. 3, the same day AHCA issued a purchase order to the firm — instructed the firm to continue providing services to DEP. But it also authorized up to $2.4 million in additional advertising services for AHCA.
Metadata on the Statement of Work linking the two state agencies identifies the author as Kayla McLaughlin, a communications staffer in the Executive Office of the Governor.
As with the Governor’s Office and FDOT, representatives for the Agency for Health Care Administration declined to answer any questions. So it’s not clear why AHCA chose to tap into a contract held by a different agency rather than issue a new contract of its own. But it’s possible that the arrangement allowed the Governor’s Office to sidestep procurement rules that may have slowed the process down.
If so, it wasn’t the only time that DeSantis and his staff bent public spending rules as they raced the election clock.
For instance, to get that initial $270,000 ad buy completed in time for the weekend football games, records show AHCA got permission to cut a check in advance.
Under Florida law, state agencies are generally only supposed to pay contractors after they received the product or service they purchased. Agencies can apply for a waiver to pay a contractor in advance — but only when doing so is “in the best interest of the state.”
ACHA got such a waiver for its football ads.
Records show that on Sept. 12 of last year — just 48 hours before its ads aired during weekend’s football games — AHCA applied for and received permission from state auditors to make a $275,000 advance payment to Strategic Digital Services.
A corresponding invoice submitted that same day by Strategic Digital Services shows the immediate payment covered $270,000 in television ads, plus a $5,000 fee for the marketing firm.
AHCA leaders never specified exactly what agency was buying in the formal memo they submitted seeking approval to pay Strategic Digital Services in advance.
But they did claim immediate payment was “essential to the operation of a state agency.”
Hijacking healthcare funding
Of the five state agencies that the DeSantis administration used to advertise against Amendments 3 and 4, four signed near-simultaneous purchase orders with Strategic Digital Services just as their commercials hit the state’s airwaves.
Those four agencies — AHCA, plus the Department of Children & Families, the Department of Education and the Department of Health — collectively spent around $16.7 million on those deals, payment record show.
At the time, the DeSantis administration tried to conceal the exact nature of all that advertising. AHCA, for instance, disclosed only vague details of its agreement with Strategic Digital Services in a public database of state contracts and purchase orders.
But the records obtained by Seeking Rents demonstrate that AHCA used the marketing firm for anti-amendment commercials.
For example, in late September of last year, AHCA made another $250,000 payment to the firm. Corresponding records show that $245,000 of that payment covered the cost of running a spot titled “Risk of Marijuana” on stations owned by iHeartMedia.
The records also offer more clues about how DeSantis paid for his ads.
The Republican governor repeatedly refused to answer questions last fall about where he was finding the money for the ad campaign, beyond vaguely alluding to “a wide variety of pots of money that are used for public service announcements.”
One of those “pots of money,” it appears, was $1 million Florida lawmakers gave AHCA last year to raise awareness of FloridaHealthFinder.gov — a public website meant help Floridians comparison shop for healthcare services and find the best prices for medical procures.
Lawmakers tucked that promotional funding for the website into the state budget under an earmark titled “Health Care Data Transparency.”
And when AHCA sought permission to pay in advance for its football ads, the agency said the spending was part of its “Health Care Transparency initiatives” and its legislative mandate to promote the Health Finder website.
It’s not the only healthcare program the DeSantis hijacked to pay for his ads against the abortion and marijuana amendments.
Separate records obtained last year by Seeking Rents show that the Florida Department of Children & Families funded much of its advertising through Strategic Digital Services using proceeds from Florida’s share of a nationwide legal settlement with manufacturers and distributors of opioids.
That’s money states are supposed to spend combating opioid addiction.
Taking money from reserves
One of the bigger mysteries during last year’s amendment elections was how the Florida Department of Transportation funded its portion of the DeSantis administration’s ad campaign. The transportation agency ultimately aired a barrage of PSAs under through its Target Zero program that focused specifically on weakening support for Amendment 3, the ballot measure that would have fully legalized weed in Florida.
The records obtained by Seeking Rents show that FDOT did so by pulling at least $5 million from reserves.
They also suggest that the agency then routed the money through an unlikely contractor — which made it all-but-impossible for anyone outside the agency to track to spending in real-time.
Specifically, on Sept. 20 of last year, emails show that FDOT leaders authorized an internal budget transfer pulling $5 million out of a reserve account to spend on “Target Zero Initiatives.”
Three days later, FDOT approved a corresponding $5 million increase to a contract with one of its main vendors.
But that vendor was not one of FDOT’s ad agencies. It was an engineering firm called RS&H, which holds a general consulting contract with the transportation agency.
The $5 million budget transfer to Target Zero and the $5 million contract increase with RS&H both used the same internal project tracking number.
What’s more, emails show that FDOT leaders used an RS&H employee named Jose Ortiz to coordinate with the Florida Association of Broadcasters, the lobbying group that helped get some of the initial Target Zero ads attacking Amendment 3 onto the air.
“Jose Ortiz sent the previous PSA video file via WeTransfer, and it worked perfectly,” Heather (Smith) Lomagistro, an executive at the broadcaster associations, wrote in an Aug. 29 email to FDOT staffers that was sent just days before the agency’s first ads began to appear around the state.
The emails also show that the Florida Association of Broadcasters submitted a $50,000 invoice to FDOT in October for that initial wave of ads. But there is no record of any direct payment between the transportation agency and the broadcasters association.
Representatives for both RS&H and the broadcasters association did not respond to requests for comment.
The $5 million may not have been the extent of FDOT’s ad spending. A few weeks after that initial transfer, records show the transportation agency approved another $2.5 million increase to its general consulting contract with RS&H.
That was the same day FDOT booked a new flight of television ads, according to disclosure forms filed by a Jacksonville television station that aired some of the spots.
Altogether, vendor records show that FDOT made three unusually large payments to RS&H in September and October of last year under that general consulting contract.
Those three payments totaled just over $6.6 million.
Hidden subcontractors
The taxpayer-funded “public service announcements” that the DeSantis administration broadcast were one of two fronts in the ad war against Amendments 3 and 4.
Political groups like the Republican Party of Florida and “Keep Florida Clean” — a committee set up specifically to oppose the marijuana amendment — paid for millions of dollars in traditional campaign ads against the citizen-led amendments, too.
Both fronts were ultimately overseen by the same people. DeSantis, as the state’s highest-ranking Republican, leads the state GOP. And the governor had his chief of staff — James Uthmeier, who DeSantis has since appointed attorney general of Florida — running Keep Florida Clean.
And records show they blurred the lines between the two public and private sides of those campaigns.
For example, the largest payment that AHCA made to Strategic Digital Services last fall came on Sept. 23, when the agency paid the marketing firm $1.525 million. That payment was for a large TV ad buy that covered all 10 media markets in Florida and reached an estimated 11.4 million viewers, invoice records show.
But those invoice records also show that nearly all of the money — all but a $5,000 fee for Strategic Digital Services — was to be passed on to a hidden subcontractor that actually produced and placed the ads.
That subcontractor is identified in the records as “Total Video Placements.” But corporate records in Ohio and filings with the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Elections Commission in Washington suggest that Total Video Placements is controlled by another advertising firm called “FlexPoint Media.”
And FlexPoint is the same firm that both Republican Party of Florida and Keep Florida Clean were using for their anti-amendment advertising.
The connections the two companies are extensive. Total Video Placements uses FlexPoint’s post office box in New Albany, Ohio. It also uses the same phone number as at least two other entities that FlexPoint set up under fictitious names.
One congressional campaign-finance report even identifies Total Video Placements as a part of FlexPoint.
And though the public record remains incomplete, it’s clear that AHCA wasn’t the only state agency secretly using the FlexPoint-linked subcontractor, either.
The records obtained by Seeking Rents show that Strategic Digital Services mistakenly submitted a second invoice to AHCA from Total Video Placements. The healthcare agency never paid that invoice, which was for just over $1.6 million.
But about a week later, vendor records show that another agency broadcasting anti-amendment PSAs — the Florida Department of Health — made a payment for just over $1.6 million to Strategic Digital Services.
Representatives for FlexPoint and Strategic Digital Services did not respond to requests for comment.
Another vendor paid from both pockets
There was at least one other vendor on the political ad campaign against Amendment 3 — the marijuana ballot measure — who was simultaneously working as a secret subcontractor on the DeSantis administration’s taxpayer-funded ad campaign.
That company: TAG Strategies, an ad firm with a history of working for DeSantis’ political campaigns — including helping to produce a goofy commercial in which the governor pretended to be a jet fighter pilot.
Campaign-finance records show that Keep Florida Clean — the anti-Amendment 3 political committee run by then-DeSantis Chief of Staff James Uthmeier — paid TAG more than $25,000 for “advertising” and “media production.”
At the same time, invoice records show that the Agency for Health Care Administration — the public healthcare agency ultimately overseen by then-DeSantis Chief of Staff James Uthmeier — paid $100,000 to TAG for “media placement and production” as a subcontractor under Strategic Digital Services.
Representatives for TAG Strategies did not respond to requests for comment.
More to come
There’s obviously a lot more digging still to be done here.
And like I said at the top of this story, Seeking Rents is still pursuing the original public records requests we made in November 2024 from the Department of Children & Families, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health.
But we’ve also filed several follow-up requests based on what we’ve already learned.
We’ve asked the Department of Health for documents connected to $5 million of advertising the DeSantis administration ordered through the Florida Pregnancy Care Network, an anti-abortion organization funded with taxpayer money. We’ve asked the Department of Transportation for invoices submitted by RS&H, as well as additional communications among senior FDOT leaders. And we’ve asked the Agency for Health Care Administration for emails from a staffer who helped coordinate that agency’s ads.
(This is probably a good place to urge anyone who has read this far to consider becoming a paid subscriber to Seeking Rents. We don’t put any of our stories or podcasts here behind a paywall; we make all our work free to all. But if you value reporting like this, there is an option to voluntarily pay for your subscription. The money we raise from those paid subscriptions helps cover costs associated with public records requests like these.)
There are also people with subpoena power poking around, too.
The most important story in Florida politics last week was the convening of a grand jury as part of a criminal investigation into the Hope Florida Foundation. That’s the Casey DeSantis-linked nonprofit that the governor’s staff used last fall to funnel $10 million from a legal settlement with a Medicaid contractor into dark-money groups that were helping fund the campaign against Amendment 3, the marijuana ballot measure.
The Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times spotted several key figures from the scandal entering the Tallahassee courthouse where the grand jury was meeting last week. They included Hope Florida’s embattled former board chair and the leader one of the other groups that agreed to be a middleman in the financial daisy chain.
This is a major scandal — and it just might lead to criminal indictments.
But it’s important to remember that the Hope Florida scheme was also just one part of a much larger plot that Ron DeSantis and his top advisors orchestrated last fall against the voters and taxpayers of Florida.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the approximate amount of money four state agencies spent through Strategic Digital Services. The amount is $16.7 million. (The story originally said $16.9 million.)
The so-called free state of Florida is a free-for-all for DeSantis' favored Republican elites and quite repressive for the rest of us.
Thank you for your service, Jason. Keep up the great work!